I'm Forbes' NY tech staff writer covering tech and advertising on the real best coast. Send tips and thoughts to akonrad@forbes.com. I previously served as Forbes' homepage editor for six months and reported before that at Fortune Magazine. I've written interviews for "The Leonard Lopate Show" on WNYC public radio and also served as a regional manager for a test prep company along the way. My love of startups and all things tech began at Harvard, where I incongruously studied medieval history and archaeology. Follow me on Twitter: @alexrkonrad

For the Accel And Sequoia Veterans Behind New Firm Wing VC, Old School Enterprise Is Still Cool

Amid the food delivery apps and dating sites hatching around Silicon Valley, there’s a new venture firm that couldn’t be a worse fit, by choice. Founded by two veterans of Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital with sixteen IPOs to their portfolios, Wing VC’s only an upstart by technicality. By its founders’ track records and its early investments, Wing is old school. But to build a legacy like the ones they left at their former firms, Gaurav Garg and Peter Wagner need to find some fresh magic for its limited partners.

Garg and Wagner have had their hands in some of the big enterprise exits of the recent years like FireEye, Nimble Storage and Ruckus WirelessRuckus Wireless, bets that took years to grow to maturity. Now they’ve been running their own firm, Wing, for a year. The two investors have been busy: Wing has made four core investments and six seed deals from its $160 million ‘Wing One’ fund. Its partners also invested in 18 companies from a ‘Wing Zero’ prototype, two of which have been acquired.

Wing focuses on leading or co-leading Series A deals at $2 or $3 million for companies still developing a product, and $8 or $10 million for companies ready to go to market. The company’s also doing seed rounds, but favoring smaller ones with smaller investor groups.

And all of that investing is happening within a focus on business markets, enterprise companies focused on data, mobile and cloud. Wagner says the pair share about a half dozen core theses on how those three areas of innovation will transform large IT companies, from their applications to their security. Wing’s partners then seek to bring their personal networks to bear in helping with recruiting and customer acquisition. “We just look for two or three areas where we can uniquely help,” Wagner says. “A wing is a simple and elegant machine, and a supportive one, too. That’s what we want to be.”

At one of Wagner’s Accel investments, Blue Jeans Network, cofounder and CEO Krish Ramakrishnan says he appreciates that Garg and Wagner are looking to provide focused help in the critical first year after a startup takes institutional money. “That’s when a very knowledgeable investor can make the huge difference with connecting you and hiring the right people. That’s where somebody working with you side by side plays a greater role.” Ramakrishnan says. ”

Ramakrishnan’s seen the value of both sides–he was actually recruited to an Accel portfolio company by Wagner while at Cisco, and then joined Accel as an entrepreneur in residence. When Wagner left Accel, the firm kept its board seat, but Ramakrishnan got board approval to make an independent seat open for Wagner to stay on. Each serves a different purpose, the founder says. “ This is my third company, and I still found it extremely valuable to get the type of attention you don’t get at a big firm.”

It’s not an investment thesis, but one theme to Wing’s founders and its fit with startups–these aren’t first-time founders straight out of Stanford looking for a quick win. Wagner admits the typical profile of a founder for Wing would be a bit older, the early 30s technical expert with years of time served at a big tech company in his or her field. Repeat founders also get a closer look.

Those qualities are part of why Wing pushed aggressively to break its own Series A rule and lead the Series B round in its latest investment, service IT company Moogsoft. Cofounder and CEO Phil Tee sold a previous company to IBM'sIBM's Tivoli group, while CMO Rob Markovich cofounded Visual Networks. When I asked Markovich if he thought the company was a fit for Wing because they weren’t exactly the youngest guys, he laughed. “The founders and most of the team are veterans,” he says.

Moogsoft went with Wing after an East Coast venture firm put in an unsolicited term sheet and got the company looking at multiple firms. “We got a few offers from good firms, but we’ve known Peter and his reputation, and with a new fund, they are hungry. Peter made it very clear how he would add value with a network of customer prospects and supplies, and he’s already introduced us to four large organizations,” Markovich says.

Wing’s still a bit of an in-betweener firm, however–its founders banking on their personal brands and their wins from Accel and Sequoia as it could take years for major successes to come under the Wing brand. That track record–16 major public IPOs for which one of the two was cofounder, board member or lead investor–gives Garg and Wagner credibility without which some boutique firms struggle to compete on price.

“There is brand value in big firms, but it’s partly a collection of the individual brands of the partners,” says Fred Guiffrida, a managing director at Horsley Bridge Partners, a limited partner in Wing’s first fund. “The more concentrated the quality of the partners, the greater your potential to get 10x your money back.”

With Wagner and Garg just looking to do a minimum of two deals a year each, the partners are not trying to cover entire markets, Guiffrida says. But Horsley Bridge doesn’t see Wing as a micro-cap, smaller fund. “These guys stand out for their experience as traditional life cycle venture capitalists. It’ll just be easier to multiply a smaller amount of money than a large one.”

So far the partners’ biggest wins may be the continued bets they’ve made on their big deals from Sequoia and Accel. From their test ‘Wing Zero’ investments, Garg and Wagner put their own money into recently public companies FireEye, MobileIron, and Nimble Storage, with a combined market capitaliation on Wall Street today of about $7.5 billion. They’ve backed 14 other $1 billion public offerings in all, including another recent enterprise success, the $2 billion company Nimble Storage. Garg himself cofounded a 90′s router company, Redback Networks, that he took public in 1999 and which sold to Ericcson in 2007 for $2.1 billion.)

Most recently, Garg and Wagner have celebrated successes with MobileIron, which reported strong earnings last week, and Opower, which went public in April. Those public offerings are largely reflected, however, on the books at their previous firms.

Still, Garg says he’s confident that the two partners can replicate their success at Wing and soon point to billion-dollar successes made just by the two of them. While the partners won’t give their exact results from ‘Wing Zero’ so far, Wagner says their personal batting averages are now actually slightly higher.

Garg says it’s a bit liberating to get away from the “complex vehicles and strategies” that come with a bigger firm. “You get deeper engagement working with a limited number of companies,” Garg says. “We have a simple structure here, and intentionally so.”

Plain talkers each, Wagner and Garg seem comfortable projecting images of experts rather than skilled diplomatists who can sway a crowded partnership meeting, though the firm’s open to taking on one or two new partners in the upcoming months. First will come the two Midas List members’ next personal IPO, number 17, in just a few weeks. But Wing’s first major milestone, fund IPO number one, will likely take years to realize.

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